


til the landslide brought me down

by 26stars



Series: How I Met Melinda [15]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Otherwise canon events are all the same, Platonic Soulmates, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:20:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24317212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Melinda has had someone's name on her body for over twenty years. Skye has never been able to read the name that's been on her ribs since birth. The journey to each other is messy, but a journey worth making.Fills the Finale Week prompt: 'Soulmate AU'
Relationships: Melinda May & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: How I Met Melinda [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/797127
Comments: 18
Kudos: 131
Collections: AOS Season 7 Countdown





	til the landslide brought me down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Uncontinuous (nights_fang)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nights_fang/gifts).



> So, at least a few years ago, Uncontinuous put some amazing tags on a post about May and Daisy, and I'm just going to let you read them yourselves:
> 
> #someone come talk to me about may and daisy as platonic soulmates  
> #someone come talk to me about their marks and words etched into their souls  
> #talk to me about how melinda never bore a name because daisy was a girl who's own name had been stolen from her  
> #and who went through names like one went through clothes  
> #hand me down names and names she wore until she found her real one or one that fit  
> #and daisy hiding the name she bore and never looking at it out of fear  
> #fear because the world only took form her and never gave her  
> #so she never looked not even to see that they weren't in English  
> #because if she never had hope then she wouldn't lose it  
> #and what's the use of finding your soulmate when you don't even know who you are  
> #but they *do* find each other eventually  
> #and it means a lot  
> #because melinda will not let this girl go  
> #and daisy will shake the universe to make melinda happy  
> #and it works because of that  
> #because at the end of the day the woman with a lost heart and the girl without a name found each other  
> #and maybe started to heal  
> #and maybe that's what being a soulmate is about  
> #being the person assigned just for you to love you as you  
> #to be your person
> 
> Thanks Uncontinuous for the inspiration--hope you enjoy the fic :)

Melinda May is two months from her twentieth birthday the day she notices her soulmark.

She’s toweling off after a morning training session with her cadet class at SHIELD Operations Academy, stripping off her sweaty workout uniform when she glimpses it, its black border poking out from beneath the band of her sports bra. When she lifts it away and turns towards the mirror, a name that she’s never seen before stares back from the right side of her chest, mirror-imaged but nonetheless legible on her skin.

_Daisy Johnson_

For twenty years, so had assumed that she did not have a soulmate—it wouldn’t have been strange; not everyone did. Plenty of people, her parents included, went their whole lives without anyone else’s names stamped by fate onto their bodies. Melinda had always considered the unmarked the lucky ones—nothing determined their fate except for themselves. She had assumed her future held the same freedom.

Now, staring at the name, she feels nothing but resentment.

_A woman, most likely, and one twenty years younger to boot. What am I supposed to do until then, just put my life on hold?_

She very much doesn’t. She finishes the Academy and is a field agent for thirteen years before she meets someone she would love to spend the rest of her life with. He doesn’t have a name on his body, and he doesn’t seem to care about the one on hers. But when Bahrain happens, she lies awake next to him for several nights straight, wondering if, for all her bravado, she really believes that fate can ever be outwitted.

~

Mary Sue Poots enters the orphanage as a one-year-old with a name stamped on her body like a gift tag, but no one there knows how to enter Chinese characters into the computer, so her soulmark is never logged. Once she’s old enough to ask nuns and foster mothers about her “special mark”, most of them shrug and say that it’s a name they don’t know how to read—"Maybe you’re not going to meet them in this country.”

Skye traces the shapes with her finger in the mirror, the delicate black pattern across her left ribs,梅巧炼, and chooses to believe it’s a beautiful name that belongs to a beautiful person.

By the time she’s a teenager, she has figured out that the characters are Chinese, and it takes a while before she meets someone who can read them to her.

“Mei Qiaolian,” a Chinese classmate tells her, and writes the syllables down when requested.

“Is it a boy or a girl name?” Skye asks breathlessly.

“Could be either.”

Skye guards that paper with her life until she has a chance to get online and start searching for the person whose life is destined to intersect with hers.

Not all soulmates are romantic—everyone knows that. But until proven otherwise, most people expect that their soulmate will be someone they spend the rest of their life with.

Skye has had enough people leave her for ten lifetimes. She’s looking forward to meeting the one person who is destined to stay.

~

Melinda goes back onto the field for Coulson and hand-picks the team herself, but on the first day, they pick up a stranger.

Skye is trouble, and not the kind May’s in the mood for. Through a few annoying weeks of unsuccessfully willing the girl away from her personal time-bomb of a situation, Skye slowly earns her place on the team and eventually their trust, just in time for her to end up on the receiving end of the Clairvoyant’s orders. Throughout the touch-and-go days of emergency surgeries and a frantic hunt for a miracle cure, Melinda takes her anger out on Quinn and herself inequal but invisible measures. Coulson finds a miracle cure beneath a mountain, the one he was never supposed to know about, but it takes him a few days to admit to it.

In the meantime, May helps Simmons care for their patient, and that’s the first time she sees her name on Skye’s skin.

They’re in the middle of helping a lucid Skye change from her hospital gown into her own clothes, so May doesn’t let herself freeze on the outside, but that doesn’t stop it from happening on the inside. Skye, still groggy from her pain medication but very much awake and aware, seems to notice May’s gaze anyway.

“Hey, you’re Chinese aren’t you?” the girl mumbles, her limbs clumsy as Simmons eases a long-sleeved shirt over her head. “Can you read it?”

“It’s a name,” May responds tonelessly, helping lay Skye back against the pillow.

“Well, yeah, but do you know anyone with that name?”

May hits the button for Skye’s morphine. “Get some rest,” she says as she leaves.

Upstairs, she locks herself in the cockpit and lets herself process what she’s just seen. Her name, the name only her parents and extended family know she was given, a name that’s not on any birth certificate or formal document, just the name written beneath her photos in scrapbooks and used by her parents at home when she was small…

Of course fate would use only that name, the one closest to her soul, to show her which other soul she was bonded to.

_But we don’t match._

The name across her own ribs is someone else, a person May has yet to meet. Whatever future she and Skye are destined for, it doesn’t look simple.

Few things in her life ever have been.

~

SHIELD has fallen. Her team’s records have been deleted. Their new home is a base that doesn’t technically exist. Ward and Garrett are gone, and now they can focus on rebuilding.

Skye needs a new S.O.

May steps into the role seamlessly, never saying Ward’s name as she un-teaches his mistakes and rebuilds a better foundation. Skye is thrilled to regularly have the woman’s full attention, is eager to please and excited to learn. But May is now Deputy Director and is privy to plenty of things Coulson doesn’t share with the rest of them, and Skye tells herself this is why there always seems to be a certain barrier between them. She wasn’t really expecting May to turn into an affectionate, nurturing type behind the scenes, but she can’t help but feel a little disappointed that, while she knows May better than before, she still knows almost nothing personal about her.

When she’s alone, Skye sometimes runs her fingertips over the name across her ribs, tracing the shapes like she did as a child, wondering what insane circumstances could one day bring her out of hiding with SHIELD and into a world where she could meet the person out there in the world that was waiting for her. The Chinese characters sometimes taunt her from the mirror, reminding her how many people in her life she is cut off from forever.

Parents, past, soulmate… for all that she’d come to SHIELD searching for, she’s found everything but those.

A few months later, she meets one of the three.

~

Skye comes out of the tunnels in Puerto Rico shaken and silent but thankfully unhurt. May doesn’t get to see her until the girl is isolated in a makeshift quarantine on their plane, secluded on Simmons’s orders. May is sent to debrief her, to get the first-person account of everything that happened after she followed Raina down into the tunnel, and Skye scoots close to the plastic barrier between them to unspool the story. Her father, Raina, the Obelisk, Trip…

“I just remember screaming his name, and then I couldn’t move, couldn’t see…when the stuff all over me started falling away, the room was shaking, falling apart…and so was he…”

The girl is visibly holding back tears, and May reaches for the barrier. On the other side of the plastic, Skye lines up her hand, and they touch without touching.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” May asks quietly.

Skye takes a deep breath.

“My father called me Daisy.”

May doesn’t let herself react until she’s alone, getting their Bus airborne to ferry her team back to the Playground.

She slips a hand beneath her shirt and touches the name that’s been waiting more than twenty years for its owner…

…she’d never thought the owner might also be waiting for her name.

~

May reappears after Fitz bandages her hand, after whispers have been exchanged and a secret concealed. Her S.O. doesn’t say anything as she enters the pod that’s been Skye’s home for the past three days, just joins Skye in gathering her clothes and things into a bag. Wordlessly, she walks Skye to her bunk, her proximity a little closer than usual, but in a protective way that Skye has come to appreciate.

May’s trained her to keep herself safe. But it’s always nice to feel like someone else is there wanting to do it to.

At Skye’s bunk, May surprises her by following her inside, shutting the door behind them.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” she asks again, and Skye feels like the guilt is actually choking her for a moment. She can’t risk it, not when she knows May’s troubled history with powered people—she can’t give this woman one more reason to potentially reject her.

Instead, Skye just meets her eyes, trying to communicate her tension without having to actually tell May the truth. Her S.O. holds her gaze for a moment, then wordlessly unfolds her arms, holding them out to Skye.

To relieved to feel embarrassed, Skye rushes into them, the first embrace they’ve ever shared.

Between their bodies, something sparks with the force of magnets snapping together, and Skye leaps away, immediately sure it’s because of the new powers buzzing beneath her skin, powers she had no intention of admitting to in this moment but is still afraid to lose control of.

May’s hand is on her ribs, but she doesn’t look terribly confused or surprised.

“I heard that’s how it feels,” the woman whispers.

Skye’s brows pinch together as May pulls up the hem of her shirt on her right side.

“Did your father tell you his last name?” she asks, grabbing Skye’s gaze.

Skye shakes her head, wondering if this is going where she thinks it is.

May rolls up the band of her bra, and Skye gasps.

_Daisy Johnson._

In red, not black.

Instinctively, Skye’s hand goes to her own ribs on her left side, a place that mirrors the position of the mark on May’s skin, where they would line up if they stood against one another. She lets out a shaky breath as she tugs up her sweater, exposing her own skin.

梅巧炼

But now the characters are red.

Gasping, Skye looks up at May, who offers an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry I never told you. But I was confused, since I didn’t have your name on me too…”

Skye cuts her off by closing the distance between them and rushing into May’s space again, pulling her into a tight hug. Between them, their aligned marks pulse, merging their heartbeats onto the same rhythm, and Skye’s eyes fill with tears.

“I wanted it to be you,” she admits in a shaky whisper. “I was afraid to ask again, but I wanted it to be you…”

“I’m sorry,” May whispers over her shoulder. “Sorry I took so long to come around.”

Skye exhales into the embrace and lets her tears fall.

“I’m just glad you’re here now.”

~

A soulmark didn't always mean a wedding, and it couldn't always mean forever. The bonds varied across the population, but one thing had always been true—the two of you were destined to do something Good and Important for one another. In some way, you were destined to help each other, be there for one another, and stand by each other.

May holds Skye against her and doesn’t let herself think too far down the road, doesn’t let herself worry about the _mights_ and the _maybes_. For now, she can tell that this is all she needs to do—stand firm and not let the girl go.

**Author's Note:**

> "Landslide" has been a MayDaisy song for me for awhile. Just give it a listen and then come gush with me. :)


End file.
